On Friday, a deranged teenager broke multiple gun laws—that were in place to prevent exactly what happened—and began shooting up Santa Fe High School in Texas. All the gun control measures in place did not stop a criminal juvenile from obtaining two guns and walking onto his school campus to kill people. What actually stopped him, however, was guns, lots of them.

The police officers responding to the shooting were all heavily armed and it was only because of their weapons that they brought in the shooter. Good guys with guns are what stop bad guys with guns.

However, police cannot be everywhere all the time. If citizens were disarmed and were forced to rely entirely on police to protect them, rest assured that the bad guys who don’t follow the law would rain terror down on the defenseless population.

In fact, according to a recent FBI report, good guys with guns—who are not police officers—have stopped multiple mass shootings, just like the one in Santa Fe, Texas.

According to the FBI report, citizens successfully intervened in eight active shooter incidents in 2016 and 2017. These heroic citizens prevented or helped to stop what could’ve been some of the worst shooting incidents in US history.

As the report notes, citizens “safely and successfully” ended the shooting by confronting the shooter—not police.

“Their selfless actions likely saved many lives,” the report stated.

Out of those eight incidents, four of the heroic citizens were carrying legal firearms and stopped the shooters in their tracks. In two of those incidents, the citizens actually exchanged fire with the shooters, illustrating how a properly trained—and armed—citizen can be an effective deterrent in mass shootings.

In the other two incidents, the armed citizens held the shooters at gunpoint until police arrived.

One of the most high profile cases of citizen intervention in a mass shooting happened in the First Baptist Church in Sutherland Springs, Texas last year.

The man hailed as a hero for confronting the Texas mass shooter during his rampage is a sharpshooting plumber with no military background — who hit the gunman through a gap in his body armor, according to a report.

Stephen Willeford managed to shoot Devin Kelley before jumping in another man’s truck and chasing him down, the Daily Mail reported…

Texas Department of Public Safety chief Freeman Martin said Willeford “grabbed his rifle and engaged the suspect” after Kelley left the First Baptist Church in Sutherland Springs, where he opened fire with an assault rifle and killed 26 people.

An area resident told the paper that Willeford, an avid biker who attends another church, learned about the shooting when his daughter called to say a man clad in body armor was shooting worshipers.

The local said that although Willeford has no military background, he didn’t hesitate when he came face to face with the suspect — and managed to squeeze off a round that struck the gunman, who had dropped his Ruger AR-15 variant.

On that fateful Sunday morning, the two men were strangers but came together to try and stop an act of heinous evil that likely saved countless lives.

In another incident, just nine days after the shooting in Texas, Travis Green began shooting up a Dollar General store in Cheektowaga, New York. A citizen ran down Green with his car, causing him to drop his gun and flee. Countless lives were saved that day.

According to the report, there were actually 50 active shooter incidents. In the other incidents, police officers—with guns—moved in to prevent further carnage and 11 of the shooters were killed by police.

The FBI defined these incidents as “one or more individuals actively engaged in killing or attempting to kill people in a populated area.” Nearly 10 percent of them were stopped by good guys with guns. Nearly twenty percent were stopped by citizens and not the police.

As the gun grabbers begin to use this incident to pass more laws that criminals will not follow and that will disarm law abiding citizens, remember that even the government admits that the thing most likely to stop a bad guy with a gun…is a good guy with a gun.

Matt Agorist is an honorably discharged veteran of the USMC and former intelligence operator directly tasked by the NSA. This prior experience gives him unique insight into the world of government corruption and the American police state. Agorist has been an independent journalist for over a decade and has been featured on mainstream networks around the world. Agorist is also the Editor at Large at the Free Thought Project. Follow @MattAgorist on Twitter, Steemit, and now on Facebook.

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